The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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You'd really rather think that news publishers would understand by now that demanding money from Google News for being in the index just doesn't work. After all, we've seen the Belgian and French newspapers rebuffed. So what are the Portuguese publishers up to? Hoping for third time lucky or something?

Publishers want payment for links to articles and the use of lead paragraphs in Google News.

Publishers in bailed out Portugal have been hit hard by a drop in advertising and sales and many media outlets have shut down.

"Our position is that the content has to be paid for ... We showed that our focus is to be paid for Google News using our news," he said, adding that the two sides planned to continue regular meetings.

This is simply nonsense as we all know. Google doesn't monetise Google News directly, so there is no revenue to share with the publishers. The snippets they do use are clearly fair use of copyright material. And Google News is also a major source of traffic for online newspapers and is thus a significant contributor to their earnings anyway.

What will actually happen is the same as what has happened in Belgium and France. Google will announce a "fund" to aid publishers in making the most of their online traffic. What this really means is that Google teaches the publishers how to put Google's advertisements on their pages. Something that will indeed raise the publishers' incomes but which will increase Google's earnings rather more.

Rather than whining though what the publishers ought to be doing is studying the voluminous information that Google provides about how to increase online ad revenues and just getting on with it. It'll achieve the same end result only more quickly.